Oh, Lord, how I hate X11.

I don’t even remember the last time I managed to install a unix and *not* have some sort of X problem. Well… A few years ago I painlessly installed Solaris on a Sun desktop with a Sun video card and a Sun monitor, but I suppose that doesn’t really count.

Usually the X install just fails to recognize my exact model of video card or monitor, so I at least get a 800×600 desktop in 16 glorious colors to start off with. Except for my last Ubuntu install, which gave me the ATI driver that didn’t actually support my ATI card. [I look forward to the day when legacy text and VESA graphics modes are dropped, and I will have to dig out my serial cable and terminal to finish my install. Anyone have a spare USB-to-serial convertor?]

Today’s fun was a new, slightly different flavor of fail… Solaris Express 9/07. It’s got a spiffy new installer, which even figured out my networking without prompting me. Nice. Rebooted after the install and… Oh No, Not Again. This time it’s complaining about a missing libXfont.so. Thankfully I was able to use the Xsun server instead of the Xorg server, which got me up and running… With the wrong resolution and the wrong monitor orientation.

*sigh*

UPDATE:

After further poking around, it seemed the SUNWxorg-server package decided it didn’t want to be installed initially. Why? No idea. One pkgadd later, and it seems to be working.

Oh gosh, I feel your pain. I’ve been messing up my X settings for a while now. Fortunately, the new version has fixed a lot of things, though I’ve still managed to run into issues (mainly due to trying to get Compiz to run). At least with the new Bulletproof X feature, things should start to work out much more smoothly.

X11 or any rendition thereof is a dead. End of story. For the love of anything remotely sacred, let’s get rid of it already. Network Transparency?. Now days X fails at both things, network transparency and display. I’m a BSDer, but X has never worked without fiddlytwinking…